WHERE THE YELLOWSTONE TAKES POSSESSION OF THE MISSOURI

Below Forsyth's Butte, last of the outstanding landmarks of the Yellowstone, the country on both sides began to smoothen and flatten out and offer less resistance to the spread of the river. The broad over-flow flats offered an ideal breeding ground for mosquitos, recalling to me that a very large portion of Clark's journey of early August was devoted to telling of the mental and physical suffering inflicted upon the members of his party by the swarms of stinging pests they had encountered just above and below the mouth of the Yellowstone. From Clark's time down to the present this particular region has always been regarded as "The Dark and Bloody Ground of the Mosquito Coast of Dakota." I was resolved to put bars between myself and the enemy that night—if not the mosquito bars of a hotel room, then the mid-stream sand-bars of the Missouri.

A broad, sweeping curve to the left, a wide bend, and then an equally broad and sweeping curve to the right opened up a long vista with low, dry, rounded hills at the end of it. With a quick catch of breath I recognized the telegraph poles of the Great Northern Railway and the scattering buildings of Fort Buford—both beyond the Missouri. A swift run under a crumbling cut-bank on the left carried me past an out-reaching tongue of yellow clay and into a quiet, sluggish, dark-stained current that came meandering along from the west.

I have mentioned the quieter, calmer current in which I had been drifting below Glendive. So it had seemed after the tumultuous mountain torrent which I had run from Livingston to Billings; yet in comparison with this decorous bride from the west the Yellowstone came to its marriage bed like a raging lion. Or, to borrow an animal from the next cage in the zoo, the Missouri, in coming down to meet and mingle with the Yellowstone, fared much like the lady who went out to ride on the tiger. If I may paraphrase:

"I finished my ride with the Lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the Tiger,"

meaning the Yellowstone. Without even pausing to crouch for a spring, the tawny, impetuous feline on whose back I had ridden all the way down from the Rockies, simply rushed out upon the muddy lamb from the western plains and gobbled it up. Seven or eight weeks later I saw the latter do the same thing to the Mississippi—crowd it right over against the Illinois shore and gulp it down. And along toward the end of October I remember thinking how like the blonde beast of the Yellowstone was a ropy coil of tawny current I found undermining a levee in Louisiana. According to the maps I had been travelling for upwards of three thousand miles on the Missouri and Mississippi, but in fancy it was the tawny tiger of the Yellowstone that had carried me all the way from the borders of Wyoming to the tide-waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

THE END

FOOTNOTE:

[1] In reading Clark's notes in the original it should be born in mind that they were written almost entirely in the third person. His spellings were often most originally phonetic, but not always conforming to one system. I have found three distinct spellings of mosquito in a single paragraph, and buffalo was often rendered "buffaloe" and "buffalow." L. R. F.